In the early 1980s, my father worked in Kinshasa, Zaire, while my mother, sister and I stayed in Sarajevo. In the summer of 1982, he came back to take us to Zaire for a six-week holiday, complete with a safari. My sister Tina and I had never been abroad. At home, we watched the soccer World Cup finals (Italy beat Germany 3:1) and flew to Rome the following day, where we were to catch an Air Zaire flight to Kinshasa. But at Fiumicino airport we found out the flight was cancelled until further notice and that Air Zaire would put us up at a hotel.

We took a shuttle to a town close to the airport. So far, "abroad" had been the vacuous airport, its duty-free shops and what we saw during the shuttle ride: nondescript buildings flying Italian flags and windows sporting the pictures of the national soccer team, the Azzuri. Father promised us we would go to Rome, as soon as we had settled in at the hotel. He was our leader in the foreign world - he spoke sternly to the Air Zaire staff; he located the shuttle and put us on board; he exchanged money and dispensed it from his little handbag with the confidence of a wealthy man. Tina and I proudly watched him negotiating our rooms at the hotel reception desk. He was conspicuously tall in a sky-blue shirt, winking at us, handling worldly matters with ease.

But then, in an instant, fields of sweat appeared on his shirt, and he started frantically pacing the lobby - he realised his handbag had been stolen. He ran outside to see if he had left it in the shuttle, but the shuttle was gone. In unintelligible English, he yelled at the receptionist. He randomly interrogated guests and service staff who happened by the lobby. His shirt was now dark with sweat, reeking of an imminent heart-attack. Mother, who had previously idled in the lobby flipping a Rubik's cube, tried to calm him down. We still had the passports, she said, it was only the cash that was stolen. Several thousand American dollars, Tina and I realised in horror. All of our holiday money.

Thus we found ourselves penniless in an unknown town, unable to go to Rome for a day trip, let alone a vacation in Africa. The possibility of a return to Sarajevo was real and devastating. Father called around frantically, informing his co-workers in Zaire that he would be late, looking into ways to go back to Sarajevo or proceed to Zaire, just get the hell out of Italy. In the process, he found out that the Kinshasa flight had been cancelled because a Zairian general had died, and the dictator Mobutu had requisitioned all three Air Zaire intercontinental aircraft to take his large entourage to the funeral.

The next day, Father was still obsessively reconstructing every move, retracing his every step to determine who the thief was. He was running out of clean shirts, even as Mother kept washing them. He eventually came to believe the theft had taken place at the reception desk: he had put down his handbag while filling out some forms, and when he turned to wink at us, the receptionist slipped it under the desk, and pretended nothing had happened. Consequently, Father installed himself in the lobby, intently monitoring the receptionist, a handsome, perfectly innocent-looking young man, waiting for him to make a mistake.

Tina and I wandered around the nameless town, excited, despite everything, to be experiencing the world: the vague smell of the Mediterranean, as if the town were on the sea; the lush variety of design in the pasta store around the corner; the intense redness of the tomatoes at the local market, which somehow corresponded with its din; the shops packed with the things socialist teenagers coveted (rock music, denim clothing, gelato ); the taverns full of loud men watching the World Cup games, reliving the triumph. When everything shut down around noon, leaving us with nothing to do, we followed a group of sun-tanned young people all the way to the beach, where we found out that the town was called Ostia and that it was, in fact, on the coast.

Returning from our expedition, Tina and I found Father sweating like a hysterical hog, glaring at the receptionist from a far corner - a veritable self-appointed hotel detective. Despite spending a couple of shifts on watch, he failed to catch the suspect in the act, or to collect any evidence against him. Needless to say, his leadership suffered. When we announced that we had discovered salt water, Mother finally abandoned the Rubik's cube and took charge. She sold her gold necklace to a hard-bargaining jeweller and informed my father that he was due to participate in a family walk by the sea. Thus the Hemons took a leisurely stroll along the Lido that evening, as if on vacation, the parents holding hands, as if in love, the children licking gelato paid for in family gold.

The following day Father told us that we would borrow money from a colleague of his and catch a flight to Kinshasa from Brussels. As we left the hotel, he shot a glance of sublime hatred at the receptionist, but Tina and I were strangely sad to be leaving. On a building across the street from the hotel, a passionate soccer tifoso had stretched a vast flag that read: Grazie Azzuri. It was the same shade of blue as my father's sweat-soaked shirt.